If Europe takes on too much we will all lose

What kind of world do we want to live in - and do we want to be able to shape it? Big questions, but the juxtaposition of two events over the next week make it urgent that we find answers. The demonstration of the US's technological military superiority in winning a stunning victory in Afghanistan has made the American Right never more confident about the unilateral use of its power. Meanwhile, the only potential countervailing power bloc in the world will next weekend embark on the hazardous course of building a new constitution and nearly doubling its membership. If unsuccessful, the meeting in the Brussels suburb of Laeken will lead to a new era of complete American domination. The stakes are high.

If few in Europe openly acknowledge the risks, be sure the strategists in the Pentagon and State Department have planned the scenarios scores of times. The US has always wanted a liberal, free market Europe, securing capitalism and democracy, but with no capability to become a partner in the exercise of Western political and military power shaping the globe. That role must remain firmly in American, unilateralist hands.

To secure its strategic aims the US has consistently pressurised the EU Commission to enlarge the European Union to encompass not just the eight applicants in Eastern Europe who want full membership along with Malta and Cyprus - but Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey as well. This has been supported by successive British governments who see it weakening the EU. The positive aspect of this campaign is that it should help secure key Western values in countries that ardently want them. The negative aspect is that enlargement threatens to make the EU ungovernable.

Without robust institutions an enlarged EU could relapse into little more than a free trade area. Europe must find a way to defer enlargement until it is capable of assimilating the new members properly. Otherwise we might as well give up on the European dream and prepare to live in a world run by the American Right.

Consider the current EU. Ever since its foundation it has been, as the great German political economist Fritz Scharpf characterises it in his seminal book Governing in Europe , engaged in essentially negative integration. It has been pulling down obstacles to the creation of first a customs union and latterly a single market. Outside this essen tially economistic, free market project its social efforts have been spasmodically important - like introducing information and consultation procedures into Britain - but in the main little has been achieved. Nation states continue to guard their sovereignty jealously.

The euro is an important advance, but what is missing is obvious. The EU has a single currency and a European Central Bank, but it has no fiscal authority that can deliver a Europe-wide economic policy. The US Fed interacts with the US Treasury and the Bank of England with the Treasury. The European Central Bank needs to interact with a similar structure. And if it did, the next issue is obvious. How would its accountability be ensured? The creation of the effective economic governance of Europe leads inexorably to the need for more effective political institutions for Europe - institutions with the power, authority and legitimacy to start the laborious position of building Europe up rather than tearing obstacles to trade down.

This is why next weekend's meeting in Laeken is so important; it is the meeting that will set the course for the next phase of the EU's constitutional development. A constitutional convention is to start work next spring on how Europe can inject more democracy and legitimacy into its operations - difficult enough for the EU of the current 15, but nightmarish for an EU of 27. The Nice Council meeting last year, working out how votes would be distributed between 27 member countries in both the European Parliament and Council of Ministers, was fiendishly complex - and ended up with a process so compromised that even Irish pro-Europeans found it indefensible. Hence the 'No' vote in the only referendum on Nice so far.

Nor is that where matters end. The new entrants are so poor with such large populations working on the land that they will stretch the EU budgets on agriculture and regional aid to breaking point. Their public sectors are woefully underpaid and riddled with corruption, extending even to their judicial and criminal justice systems. One of the more disgraceful documents the EU Commission has published was last month's ringing endorsement of a big bang entry of as many as 10 countries before the 2004 European parliamentary elections. They are not ready for entry, and neither is the EU ready to accept them. This is the brute reality, but as Le Monde argued 10 days ago, nobody dares to say it.

The EU needs to get its priorities clear. It needs some successes. It needs the euro to succeed, and that requires an extension and democratisation of the institutions that economically govern Europe - and a smarter approach to economic policy. It needs to bed down its Rapid Reaction Force. It needs a constitution to transform its governance from diplomatic horsetrading to a genuinely political and accountable process.

In today's environment of euro-scepticism and rising nationalism, all that is already hard enough. But enlargement on top threatens to break the whole enterprise. This would be dismaying enough, but the emergence of an ascendant American Right dominating a superpower whose preponderance has never been equalled in world history makes it a strategic calamity. The US was right to fight its war in Afghanistan, and Europe right to support it - but Europe also argued for a new framework of international economic and social justice that would weaken the wellsprings of terrorism.

Conservative US, it is obvious, has no interest in the idea. It does not believe in the idea of a social contract at home, let alone one abroad. The only potential pressure for such a conception is the EU - as it has been for an International Criminal Court or the Kyoto treaty on global warming. If the EU collapses into dysfunctional paralysis because of enlargement, everybody will be the poorer. So yes to closer association. Yes to eventual membership on a case by case basis. But emphatically no to big bang enlargement. The stakes are just too high.